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Troy MI

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I feel like the majority of people who post on these boards are missing the chance to take a step back and understand the bigger picture and even their own motivations. It's just teamsports politics thru and thru. Everything is terrible when the other guy is in office and everything is great when it's your guy. Every piece of evidence in support of your side is true and everything against is fake news. We elect people more to spite the other side than anything else. Yet you miss the fact that there are good, intelligent people on both sides of the isle. Give me your least favorite political ideology and I can point you to someone smarter than you (or me, or any of us) who subscribes to that ideology. More importantly, this artificial vitriol we have for the other side is leads to "fuck you" politicians, or at the very least mediocre ones. Sure, candidate X has some pretty serious flaws, but he's promising to give the big middle finger to the people who vote differently from you - so he's the one! Or candidate Y is the only alternative to the middle finger guy, so he's the one! This mentality is why we are where we are. Sure, there's a case to be made that this was the inevitable result of social media (hell, before social media I didn't even know where most of my friends stood politically...), but there's also an opportunity here for people to learn self awareness, rather than being slave to the emotional assumption that people who don't think like them are somehow a cartoon-villain, or brainwashed, or stupid, or whatever. I think everyone should vote, to be clear, but I think logic should take precedence over anger and fear when we make those choices in the ballot box. For crying out loud...we ought to primary in people who can actually break 50% approval ratings, not the ones who appeal to our basic instincts and nothing more.